E la nave Va (1983)

January 26, 1984

FILM: FELLINI LATEST, 'THE SHIP SAILS ON'

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: January 26, 1984

THOUGH the occasion of Federico Fellini's ''And the Ship Sails On'' initially seems somber, the film often looks like a joyful act of cinematic prestidigitation. At its best moments ''And the Ship Sails On'' floats serenely above the realities of ordinary movies - not to deny the validity of those realities but to expand the imagination.

Like ''Amarcord,'' Mr. Fellini's new work is enchantingly stylized, a bold testament to the artifice of studio-made movies, which the onetime neo-realist director (''La Strada,'' ''Nights of Cabiria'') now makes his message as well as his style. Unlike ''Amarcord,'' however, ''And the Ship Sails On'' has no easily recognizable, visible center, which may be off-putting even to Fellini aficionados. It's not a film about anything as specific as childhood memories. Rather, it's a succession of mostly comic commentaries on art and artists, whose self-absorption Mr. Fellini finds both wickedly funny and very moving.

The time is July 1914, less than three weeks after the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist at Sarajevo, the event that was to serve as the pretext for the start of World War I.

The occasion is a memorial cruise aboard a marvelously fantastic luxury liner, whose passengers have come together to honor the art of a recently deceased diva named Edmea Tetua. In the course of the cruise, the climax of which is to be the ceremonial spreading of the diva's ashes on the waters off the Adriatic island of her birth, the passengers bicker, make love and indulge their furious rivalries to the hilt. They include vain tenors, imperious sopranos, conductors with secret sex lives, some of the diva's former lovers, as well as an obsessed Italian count, who has turned his cabin into a museum stuffed with memorabilia, and an androgynous Austro-Hungarian archduke and his blind sister, the Princess.

The comparative tranquillity of the cruise is broken on the second day when the liner picks up a large group of Serbian refugees, including some who may well be terrorists. At first the elegant passengers tend to be gracious to the poor refugees, who, after a bit, attempt to take over first class. That, of course, is going too far. The refugees are quickly dispatched to the lower decks.

The plot, if one can call it that, also involves a homesick rhinoceros being shipped to an Amsterdam zoo, and an Austro-Hungarian battleship, whose captain demands the return of the Serbian refugees. This, in turn, prompts Mr. Fellini to give us his version of the events that led to war.

This is more or less the outline of the film, which doesn't depend for 10 seconds on anything as conventional as identifiable characters or a narrative. Nor, in fact, is the film very much concerned with the imminent demise of one civilization and birth of another. The film is not a farewell, either to an era or a diva, but it is about the mysterious endurance of the creative impulse, which the film maker appears to equate with mankind's capacity for survival. That, however, may be to weight the show with more than Mr. Fellini ever intended.

I use the word ''show'' for a purpose. ''And the Ship Sails On'' is more like a circus than an ordinary movie, though the characters are drawn mostly from the world of grand opera. The show's ringmaster is an ebullient, middle-aged journalist called Orlando (Freddie Jones), who often talks directly to the camera and who invites us to share his asides about the lunacies we are watching.

Among these lunacies is the film's dazzling opening sequence in which we witness the passengers' arrivals at dockside, prior to boarding the liner Gloria. The movie begins as a sepia-tinted silent film, accompanied only by the whirr of the ancient projector. As the images slide into color, so does the sound come up. At the end of the sequence, one of the conductors on hand leads the passengers, the crew, the dockworkers and everyone else within the film frame in a hilariously solemn pastiche that appears to have been put together from bits and pieces of Verdi's ''Forza del Destino,'' with new lyrics by Andrea De Carlo.

In ''And the Ship Sails On'' Mr. Fellini does to a number of favored opera scores what he does to the reality of conventional movies. He turns those scores upside down and inside out, adding new lyrics when it pleases him and, in general, doing the kind of outrageous acts that must be designed to offend all purists. Some of this is very funny, as in a sequence in which the ship's captain takes his noted passengers below to see the boiler room. When one of the stokers asks for a song, one tenor obliges, only to be joined in a fearful competition by another tenor and, eventually by all of the other singers on hand.

There are also sequences that seem to be unnecessarily opaque, one of which involves the princess and her brother's prime minister. Some important characters appear suddenly in the middle of the movie and as suddenly disappear. One of these is a mad Russian opera star who claims he can hypnotize a chicken simply by singing to it, which he does.

Though the movie has its share of lost moments, it is constantly being brought up to new peaks of pleasure in ways that only Mr. Fellini can carry off. At least a half-dozen of these equal anything in the somewhat more consistent ''Amarcord.''

The cast, as is usual in a Fellini film, is an odd assortment of international actors. They have been chosen primarily for the way they look since all of the dialogue, as is also Mr. Fellini's custom, has been post-synchronized in an Italian that, much of the time, doesn't fit the lip movements.

In addition to Mr. Jones, the cast includes Barbara Jefford, as an especially handsome diva who wants to succeed the dead Edmea Tetua; Janet Suzman, who is seen as Edmea in some short film clips, and Peter Cellier, as an English conductor who finds pleasure in his wife's infidelities. It's difficult to comment on the performances, principally because actors in a Fellini film exist to be moved about and photographed as the director sees fit, which, I suspect, has less to do with acting than with behavior and, possibly, patience. Far more important to the film's ultimate effect are the contributions of Giuseppe Rotunno, Mr. Fellini's favorite cameraman; Dante Ferretti, the art director, and Maurizio Millenotti, the costume designer.

''And the Ship Sails On,'' which opens today at the Cinema 1, is to most movies what the Folies-Berg ere was to the theater, a celebration of spectacle, even when it exists only for its own sake.

''And the Ship Sails On,'' which has been rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''), includes some mildly suggestive sexual sequences.